We Are Okay(50)

They leave when the credits roll and then come back with a few more gifts.

“Is the package still in your bag?” I ask Mabel.

She nods and I find it. It looks unfinished against the festive wrapping paper of the presents they brought, but I’m glad to have something for them. I realize now why Mabel tried to wait to open hers and I’m sad that I don’t have something else to give her.

Javier laughs at the white tree. He shakes his head.

Ana shrugs. “It’s kitsch. It’s fun.”

Quiet descends. I can feel how late it is.

“Mabel,” Javier says. “Can you come with me for a moment?” and soon it’s only Ana and me on the sofa next to the glittering lights. And when Ana turns to me, I realize that our solitude has been orchestrated.

She says, “I have something I want to tell you.”

Her mascara has smudged under her eyes, but she doesn’t look tired.

“May I?” she asks, and takes my hand. I squeeze hers back, expect her to let go but she doesn’t.

She says, “I wanted to be your mother. From the first night I met you, I wanted that.”

Everything in me begins to buzz. My scalp and my fingers and my heart.

“You came into the kitchen with Mabel. You were fourteen. I already knew a couple things about you, my daughter’s new friend whose name was Marin, who lived alone with her grandfather, who loved reading novels and talking about them. I watched you look around. You touched the painted dove above the sink when you thought no one was looking.”

“I don’t like to anymore,” I find myself saying.

She looks confused.

“Read novels,” I say.

“You probably will again. But even if you don’t, it doesn’t matter.”

“But what if it does?”

“What do you mean?”

“What if I’m not that girl who walked into your kitchen?”

“Ah,” she says. “Okay. I see.”

The heater rattles; the hot air blows. She leans back to think, but still holds my hand tight.

I’m making this hard for her. All I want is to say yes.

“Mabel told us everything. About the two of you. About Gramps and how he died. About what you discovered after he was gone.” Tears fill her eyes and spill over but she hardly seems to notice. “Tragedy,” she says. “Heartbreak.” She stops and then she makes sure that I’m looking at her. “Betrayal.” Her eyes bore into mine. “Understand?”

They had waited for me in the station lobby and I left through the back exit. I didn’t call them back a single time. I made Mabel come here to track me down, and now I’ve made them come to me as well.

“I’m so sorry,” I say.

“No, no,” she says, as though I’ve asked to wear lingerie to a school dance. “Not us, you. You were betrayed,” she says.

“Oh.”

“These are all things that change a person. If we endure them and we aren’t changed, then something is wrong. But do you remember her? That dove in my kitchen?”

“Of course,” I say. I think of how beautifully painted her head is. I think of her copper wings.

“You are still you,” Ana says. “And I still want to be your mother. You were alone for longer than you realized. He did the best he could. I am certain of that. He loved you. There is no question. But since that night when you called Javier and me for help, we have been waiting for a time to tell you that we want you in our family. We would have told you that morning, but you weren’t ready.”

She wipes tears off my face but more rush after.

“Say yes,” she says.

She presses her mouth to my cheek, and my heart swells, my chest aches.

“Say yes.”

She smooths my hair behind my ear, away from my wet face. I can’t stop crying. This is more than a room with my name on a door. More than glasses of water out of their kitchen sink.

She pulls me close to her, until I’m smaller than I knew I could be. Until I fit against her chest, my head nestled where her neck meets her shoulder, and I gasp because I remember something.

I thought that Ocean Beach would do it or maybe the pink shells or the staring at her photograph. I thought that one of these things, one day, might help me remember.

But it happens now, instead.

My mother’s salty hair, her strong arms, her lips against the top of my head. Not the sound of her voice, not her words, but the feeling of her singing, the vibrations of her throat against my face.

“Say yes,” Ana says.

My tiny hand clutching a yellow shirt.

The sand and the sun.

Her hair like a curtain, keeping me shaded.

Her smile when she looked at me, burning with love.

It’s all I remember, and it’s everything.

I’m still gasping. I’m holding Ana tight. If she lets go, the memory might go with her. But she holds me close for a very long time, and then she takes my face between her hands and says, “Say yes.”

The memory is still here. I can still feel it.

And I have yet another chance, and I take it.

“Yes,” I say. “Yes.”



We were on a beach and the sun was bright and I was in my mother’s arms. She was singing to me. I can’t hear the song, but I can hear the tone of her voice; and when the singing stopped, she rested her face on my head. The whole world was out there. Honeybees and deciduous trees. Swimming pools and grocery stores. Men with vacant eyes, bells on diner doors, motels so bleak and lonely they settle in your bones. Mabel and Ana and the man Gramps would become or perhaps was already. Each someday and each kiss. Each specific kind of heartbreak. The whole world was out there, but I was in my mother’s arms, and I didn’t know it yet.